Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

When Joe Medeiros first read the story about the theft of the “Mona Lisa” in 1911, he was fascinated by the little-known piece of history.

Bit by bit, he did the research, and after 30 years, he and his wife, Justine Mestichelli Medeiros, completed the documentary, “Mona Lisa is Missing: The True Story of the Man Who Stole the Masterpiece.”

The Westlake Village couple — he’s the writer and director, she’s the co-producer — will answer questions about their work Wednesday after a free showing of the film at 7 p.m. at the AMC Dine-In Thousand Oaks 14 at The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks. The event is part of California Lutheran University’s fifth annual International Film Festival.

Joe Medeiros’ obsession began in 1974 when his wife gave him a book about Leonardo da Vinci as a Christmas gift. It was their first Christmas together.

A couple of years later, when he caught the brief passage about the theft, the Temple University film studies graduate had a notion: “I thought this would make a great movie,” he said.

And so the adventure began.

While working at an ad agency in Philadelphia, he began to write a fictional account of the event. And even though it was fiction, he still had to do some research.

“Back then, you had to leave the house to get information, so I went to the library and rolled through their microfiche and went back to 1911 newspapers and read the New York Times and Washington Post accounts, making copious notes, thinking I was going to write a script,” he recalled.

The story revolves around Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who made off with the masterpiece from the Louvre and hid it for two and a half years.

Posted!

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

Writer and director Joe Medeiros and his co-producer wife, Justine Mestichelli Medeiros, display a replica of the "Mona Lisa." Their documentary about the 1911 theft of the painting will be showing in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday, with a question-and-answer session afterward. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR

Writer and director Joe Medeiros and his co-producer wife, Justine Mestichelli Medeiros, display a poster about their documentary about the 1911 theft of the "Mona Lisa." The documentary will be shown Wednesday in Thousand Oaks. CHUCK KIRMAN/THE STAR

Interested in this topic? You may also want to view these photo galleries:

But when it came to the details, many accounts were contradictory. Joe Medeiros found himself having to make up too many stories. Discouraged, he put aside the project.

In the meantime, he’d found he had a talent in comedy, and after taking a correspondence course in joke writing, he began selling jokes. He got his material to Jay Leno, who hired him in 1988 while Leno was subbing for Johnny Carson.

He and his wife moved to Los Angeles when Leno permanently took over for Carson in 1992, and he became head writer in 1995. He stayed in that position until 2009.

The “Mona Lisa” script still gnawed at him, and every now and then, he’d take it out of the drawer.

“It was kind of like an itch I couldn’t scratch,” he said.

The big breakthrough came via the internet. One day in 2007, Joe Medeiros searched the name Peruggia in Google and up popped an article about Celestina Peruggia, the thief’s daughter, by now 84 years old, that he didn’t know existed.

With help from an interpreter, he struck up a relationship with the Italian senior, and his wife eventually suggested her husband make a documentary about the theft. But Celestina Peruggia was only 1½ years old when her father died, and she’d never been told about the theft until she was 20 years old. After all, it wasn’t quite something to brag about.

So the Medeiros couple went on a quest to uncover the facts.

From the police interrogation, they uncovered how Vincenzo Peruggia made off with the masterpiece and where he hid it. And through letters Peruggia wrote to his parents, they reveal the thief’s much-questioned motive for the heist.

The film was released in 2014 with details that even Peruggia’s daughter had longed to know.

The Medeiros say they’re thrilled that the documentary is part of the film festival.

“We’ve shown it all over the country, and it’s shown on television in France and in Italy, in London, in Iran,” Joe Medeiros said. “So it’s great to show it just up the street.”

“It’s really exciting for us because our community really doesn’t know we did this film,” Justine Mestichelli Medeiros said.

If you go

What: “Mona Lisa Is Missing: The True Story of the Man Who Stole the Masterpiece”